NBC Claims Opening Ceremony Was Too "Complex" to Stream Live

Every country in the world had the option to watch the London 2012 Opening Ceremony live, except the United States. Well, almost every country. We’re presuming North Koreans also saw a heavily-edited version on tape delay. What was NBC’s rationale for showing the event only on tape-delay and actively preventing the streaming of it online? The entertainment spectacle was “too complex” and needed “context” from NBC’s award-winning production team.

“We are live streaming every sporting event, all 32 sports and 302 medals,” an NBC spokesman wrote in an email to Show Tracker. “It was never our intent to live stream the Opening Ceremony or Closing Ceremony. They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large prime-time audiences that gather together to watch them.

NBC thinks you are stupid, America. The network does not trust your stunted intellect to process content. You need “an award-winning production team to spoon feed you, lest you become confused if they just showed you what was happening. In reality the only people confused were those who followed NBC Olympics on twitter, and received live tweets for an event NBC was actively preventing them from watching live.

Does not translate well online? What the hell does that mean in 2012? My cable box was busted. I watched this online on my laptop, because as a Time Warner subscriber I can have my cable streamed over “the Internet” to any screen convenient to me, in HD.

It is also needless. If NBC’s target audience is the 50-60 year-old casual viewer who only wants content through a television, that viewer is still going to tune in at 7:30pm for the canned content anyway. These are decisions viewers are capable of making for themselves. Why not spend the resources used to thwart demand to account for it?